My frame rate for Call of Chernobyl is terrible, it's effectively unplayable, and it looks dreadful. Nothing like those nice screenshots on the ModDB page.

The game installed perfectly and launched correctly first time, load times quite normal, I've had no issues with it whatsoever other than I cannot get it to perform smoothly or look particularly good - in fact it looks sodding awful. I checked the FAQ, I've been round the block with STALKER games and mods before so I was already using the DX9 enhanced dynamic lighting renderer, and my grass distance and sun rays were already low, but I set them to off anyway. This made only a slight improvement, taking my average frame rate in the Cordon rookie village up from 14 to 17.

I've been down this road many times before, I've often had to tweak in-game settings, user.ltx, console, CCC settings, ENBs, various .cfgs, I can get CS and CoP to look great and play perfectly, 60FPS or greater isn't a problem even for Misery +ENB +SweetFX with every graphic detail maxed out, 8xEQ AA, supersampling, edge-detect, 16x AF, max tessellation, max textures, 1920x1080 resolution. My computer is quite capable of dealing with this, i7-3770K, 32Gb DDR3, 2x R9 380s in Crossfire, 2Tb SSD, so I'm scratching my head now. What am I missing?

Knowing that Stalker games can behave poorly with Crossfire, I tried using just one card. No difference at all. I tried that trick with opening taskmgr to change cpu affinity, but this didn't improve things either.

I'd live with it looking like kak if it at least played smoothly, but even turning everything almost everything off only gets it to a barely playable 23 - 26fps. Radeon settings are bog-standard defaults, as low as they can be. Because it looks so bad for me anyway, almost like original SoC when it was first released, turning everything off doesn't actually make much visual difference apart from the grass distance and sun rays. The Atmosfear settings are still at their defaults, I didn't fiddle with them. Just to check that nothing untoward had happened to my pc, I fired up both CS/Mystery+AO and CoP/Misery+TAZ, smooth as silk both of them. Obviously I didn't install CoC into my CoP installation.

It has to be fixable; if both CS and CoP are okay with demanding mods then in principle so should CoC on its own, shouldn't it? Did I miss something or do something wrong?

That's very useful to know, thank you. r_geometry_lod was set to 3.0 so I knocked that down to .75 then did a comparison with my CoP user.ltx for Misery, changed some other values that seemed unusually out-of-range and might be having a detrimental effect. That improved things a lot, I got 37fps right away just from changing that one variable. I did not realise that it was possible to push those values so much higher than in CoP.

I also made myself a new Radeon profile from scratch, and with a bit of jiggerypokery in there was able to get the game looking a lot better (AA/AF, textures, tesselation) without compromising too much performance. It's definitely playable now, getting 60-90fps. Thank you for the timely advice.

Farjole_Merrybody wrote:That's very useful to know, thank you. r_geometry_lod was set to 3.0 so I knocked that down to .75 and did a comparison with my CoP user.ltx for Misery and changed some other values that might be having a detrimental effect. That improved things a lot and I got 37fps. I did not realise that it was possible to push those values so much higher than in CoP.

I also made myself a new Radeon profile from scratch, and with a bit of jiggerypokery in there was able to get the game looking a lot better (supersampling, textures, tesselation) without compromising too much performance. It's definitely playable now. Thank you for the timely advice.

Yeah, not many people are aware of this change. I knocked it down to 1.5 max for 1.4 release since it is such a huge FPS killer and many people might not realize it.

"I have a dream that one day this community will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all mods are created equal."

I also found that launching from the xrengine.exe rather than the stalker-coc.exe and using the -noprefetch switch helped. I was a bit befuddled as to the "no fsgame.ltx" warning that I got when I first tried that, until I realised that fsgame_coc.ltx was the same file. That was quick enough to fix. it's running really nicely now and is looking quite good.

As I'm playing it in DX9, an ENB and SweetFX setup should be okay, right? Or did you already include the ReShade option as part of DX10?

Farjole_Merrybody wrote:I also found that launching from the xrengine.exe rather than the stalker-coc.exe and using the -noprefetch switch helped. I was a bit befuddled as to the "no fsgame.ltx" warning that I got when I first tried that, until I realised that fsgame_coc.ltx was the same file. That was quick enough to fix. it's running really nicely now and is looking quite good.

As I'm playing it in DX9, an ENB and SweetFX setup should be okay, right? Or did you already include the ReShade option as part of DX10?